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View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoCzarek Sokolowski | Associated Press photosHolocaust survivors arrive for a ceremony to mark the 69th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a Nazi death camp in Oswiecim, Poland.

KRAKOW, Poland — More than 50 members of the Israeli parliament toured the prisoner blocks at
Auschwitz yesterday to commemorate the 69th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death
camp.

The delegation was the biggest from the Knesset, the 120-seat Israeli parliament, to visit the
camp in Oswiecim, Poland, where the Nazis killed some 1.5 million people, most of them Jews,
between 1940 and 1945.

The Knesset members were joined by Holocaust survivors, Israeli government ministers, Polish
officials and representatives from dozens of other countries to mark the date, International
Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“Today, 69 years after we left this hell called Auschwitz, we are here again as proud people, as
proud citizens of the new Jewish state that rose out of the ruins of European Jewry,” Israeli
Auschwitz survivor Noah Klieger, 87, told a memorial ceremony.

Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog, head of the Israeli delegation, said Jews must work to create
for future generations “a different world, a hopeful future, a world without fear where a Jew will
be safe in any and every place.

“If we lose the hope to build a new world, then we give in to Auschwitz.”

Earlier, the Israeli delegates walked beneath a sign with the German words
Arbeit Macht Frei —
Work Makes You Free — the same sight that greeted inmates arriving at the camp. All but a
few died in the gas chambers, in medical experiments, or of disease and malnutrition.

Yesterday’s tour included a stop at the prison blocks where piles of human hair and children’s
clothes have been preserved as evidence of the mass killings.

In a statement released by his office to mark the day, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
said that the world’s attitude toward Israel is a continuation of thousands of years of
anti-Semitism.

“(Despite) the attempt to deny the legitimacy of the (Jewish) state, we must struggle and demand
our rights here,” he said.